The following statement was issued today by the Spokesman for UN Secretary‑General António Guterres:
NEW YORK, 18 December (Office for Disarmament Affairs) — The United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific and the Government of Cambodia are jointly organizing a Regional Seminar on Illicit Trafficking and Diversion of Small Arms and Light Weapons and Other Conventional Arms and Ammunition in South‑East Asia. The Seminar will be held from 19 to 20 December in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
The risk of an accidental escalation of tensions leading to conflict was being multiplied by misplaced overconfidence, dangerous narratives and rhetoric, as well as a lack of communication channels, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today.
On 4 December 2017, the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2127 (2013) concerning the Central African Republic held informal consultations to consider the final report of the Panel of Experts and hear briefings by the United Nations Mine Action Service and United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) on weapons and ammunition management in the country.
United Nations Secretary‑General António Guterres arrived in Tokyo from Paris on Wednesday evening, 13 December.
United Nations Secretary‑General António Guterres arrived in Paris from New York early on Tuesday morning, 12 December, to attend the One Planet Summit.
The Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) took up the Secretary-General’s request today to the General Assembly for $636.6 million to support 34 special political missions during the biennium 2018-2019, with delegates seizing the opportunity to press for substantial changes to the way those missions — almost all of them the creation of the Security Council — were funded.
Opening its seventy‑first session today, the Trusteeship Council elected Anne Gueguen of France as its President and Jonathan Guy Allen of the United Kingdom as its Vice‑President.
The United Nations refugee agency evacuated 74 refugees, mostly children and women, from Libya to Niger. In the Central African Republic, voluntary repatriation of Sudanese refugees has begun; since Tuesday, 230 refugees have arrived in Sudan. Agency-chartered flights will bring some 1,500 refugees home by the end of 2017.
Following are UN Secretary‑General António Guterres’ remarks to the Security Council meeting on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in New York today:
